Contents - Beth Lesser

narrow confines of entertainment and become an alternative to what we know
as our criteria for progress. If not channeled, dancehall will create a class of
people which is incapable of doing-anything productive.” *
Mutabaruka, Rastafarian dub poet, ranted, “Don’t you know that in
America is mostly white people buy reggae music? Yes, and whenever white
people hear about ‘punani’ business them get turn off …” ** Ironically, it turned
out not to be the cultural music, but the ‘gansta’ identification and lewd rapping
that eventually brought Jamaican music to the North American pop
market in the ‘90s.
Now that Bob Marley had made reggae music a major tourist draw, people
feared that dancehall would spoil Jamaica’s newly acquired status as a ‘cool’
country to visit. And the aspect of dancehall that worried them the most was
‘slackness’, the new vogue of using bawdy lyrics and sexually explicit themes.
What the critics failed to understand was that the changeover to slackness
was a move away from revolution and represented a new-found feeling of
comfort and luxury. At last people were able to let their guard down and go
to parties, drink and dance and relax. As Floyd George points out, “Two or
three years ago we were dealing with such moral issues as the imprisonment
of masses of people under the rules of a questionable State of Emergency. The
newspapers and the electronic media, the bar-room gossip and verandah talk
were about the slimy sequences of the ‘Spy’ Robinson story; the great Gunpowder
Plot that never was; the clandestine importation of ‘boolets’; the Gold
Street Massacre; The Green Bay Slaughter, The Orange Street and Eventide
Fires; the Migration of ex-Ministers; the confusion of the Church and so on
and so forth. Those were the days and the issues that seem so easily forgotten
now.” *** The fact that those issues were forgotten meant that people wanted to
forget them and move on with their lives. And that included going to dances,
finding a partner, having a warm Guinness and maybe looking for a little
romance.
An album, released in 1984 on Arrival, summed up the division in Jamaican
popular music at the time. Slackness V. Culture featured Yellowman, on
the ‘slackness’ side, clashing with Charlie Chaplin, standing strong for ‘culture’.
The dancehall audience was similarly divided – some people frequented
the sounds that carried the slack deejays while others went to the few roots
and culture sounds. In the early ‘80s, slackness was clearly in the lead.
Despite the perceptions of those warning about this ‘new’ form of music,
the practice of singing lewd songs didn’t start with dancehall. According to
Frankie Campbell, leader of the Fab Five, “Slackness as a style was nothing
new to Jamaica. There is no music slacker than Mento which was already, at
the time, over 100 years old as a music form.” Popular songs containing sug-
* Is dancehall a creative force? The Daily Gleaner, Tuesday, November 29, 1988
** Punani- Female genitalia, quote from Sports ‘N’ Arts, September11-25, 1987 p.16
*** August 12, 1982, Songs of the Times, Jamaica Gleaner
84 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall